Scott Morrison's appreciation of the limitations of transactional politics has come late and, no doubt by coincidence, just when he has had little to trade with voters. Now we must think not of what is good for us, personally, but of what is good for the country.

"We have got to stop looking at the country as if it's a whole bunch of individuals, and [that] they are all looking for their little bit out of the government," he says. "If that's the sort of country we are going to run, we'll run it into the ground and we will run each other into the ground.

"Australians are over this class warfare," he has decided. "They are over it. They know the big economic challenges that are out there facing them and their future. What they want from us is a stronger economic plan that gets them to that other side."

Or, perhaps, merely a stronger economy, with or without his "plan". Faith in plans, Labor or Liberal, is even more difficult than hope or love. The best any current Treasurer can expect is vague optimism that the nation will muddle through somehow, in spite of international, national and local headwinds, and perhaps despite the politicians, the Treasury, and strange fiscal and monetary policies.

Modern Australian politicians are almost invariably diffident about their long-term visions, if any, or of their concept of the public interest. It's not necessarily that they are inarticulate, even if the focus groups confirm that modern Australian leaders in politics or business are markedly short on empathy or capacity to inspire. Decades of repeating meaningless feel-good words have deprived them of the power to say anything that strikes a chord. It sometimes seems that the best they can do is to create some impression of being competent – and that some prop even at that hurdle.

We might all agree about the need for a healthy economy in which individuals can prosper and from which governments can flourish enough to provide defence forces and a larger and less accountable national security state, with, perhaps, as a bonus, age pensions, education and health care. But our leaders tend to shy from quantifiable aspirations about being international citizens, with aid or refugees. Or about the environment, or the standard of health, education and living that the children of 2040 will enjoy. Or real targets as partners in relieving poverty for Aborigines and other members of a growing underclass. It's enough, apparently, that we just care, even if we cut aid and dump asylum seekers in faraway concentration camps, and restrict sacrifice for and investment in the future to gestures.

Scott Morrison insisted that his budget was more a plan for jobs and the economy rather than a program for a year of government, or some classic pre-election give-away. But if he had only a little to dispense he was being altogether too modest in pretending that there was not a very political eye on the distribution of the goodies. Ask South Australia, the beneficiary of the uneconomic conversion of defence policy into an industry plan. Or business, given modest tax concessions on altogether unproven Treasury dogma about low taxes stimulating business investment. Or science, health and education, squeezed to do it.

It was nice to see voters chided for wondering what was in it for them, not least by a self-styled conservative. Transformational politics is supposed to be the domain of the left; transactional politics of the right. Was Scott Morrison lurching anywhere for excuses, proclaiming the end of the age of entitlement, or perhaps anticipating the charge that he was being askew and unfair?

Was it perverse to think that the image of the individual, alert for-self interest and unconcerned about the common interest, sat in on the eve of an election supposed to be, in part, about competing philosophies of government. The father of economics and the apostle of free markets, Adam Smith, thought that it was just the selfishness of the individual which made an economy work.

Here he is in 1776: "Every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it.

"He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for society that it was no part of his intention. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it."

Though, as Margaret Thatcher remarked in 1978, there is only so far that one can go in talking sensibly about "society".

"I think we've been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem it's the government's job to cope with it: 'I have a problem, I'll get a grant'; 'I'm homeless, the government must house me'," she said.

"They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first."

I doubt that the coming election will see much appeal to philosopher economists. Or to efforts, which scarcely ever work whether among the rich or the poor, to lower popular expectations of what can be expected of government. The capacity of government to satisfy demand may be lower if only because domestic control of the national economy is precarious and the gap between conventional politicians of the left and right so narrow. But wouldn't it be nice if it were.

Malcolm Turnbull was a fine schoolboy debater and, later, legal advocate, yet though well-liked in politics has never given a political speech, much less about philosophy, that anyone could remember or quote. Bill Shorten is more pedestrian, and less able to fake sincerity, but is often good on the stump when he pretends that he, too, has had dirt under his fingernails. Both have the education, the training and the practical experience in government to engage in debate that did not turn on slogans, slurs cheap points. Each has, at different times, promised to respect electors and to address them seriously.

Don't die waiting for a serious debate about fundamental philosophies of government during the campaign. Even if Shorten had a less conservative (or more socialist) philosophy one than Turnbull (which has yet to be established) he cannot afford to take the chance of being thought to be extravagant in his view of what the economy can bear, or what the nation could do for those who have been left behind.

Shorten, who is at least slightly the underdog, is only in the game because he has taken risks in advancing some brave policy positions and political promises. But he has never been crazy brave.

Indeed he may well have actually outflanked Turnbull on fiscal conservatism, (as Kevin Rudd did John Howard in 2007), on having a clear economic program, and on traditional Labor issues of health, education and welfare, subjects (like the NBN broadband program) on which the Coalition seems to have little to say. He has seemed so far to have more to say, and more to offer, than the Coalition.

Against this, Turnbull will say, as Howard did in 2004, that the election is about trust, and that confidence in Shorten or Labor must be discounted against the shambles of Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government in 2007-2013.

This is a powerful argument, but one which itself needs a discount given the similar shambles of Abbott government, the indecision of Turnbull government and the seeming lack of commitment to controls on spending. The Coalition's problem can be summed up by its incapacity, because of its own record, to attack Labor for deficit and debt, or to argue that Labor left it with an economic crisis or emergency.

Labor populism on spanking banks may be more in tune with popular opinion than a self-conscious Coalition deference to the big end of town, and is still, in any event, matched by Coalition populism on refugee policy. But Labor is pitched at economic responsibility, perhaps more single-mindedly so than Scott Morrison.

If the politicians are not offering bribes, there is only a limited competition for the better vision of the future or the light on the hill. In such a situation, the election could quickly become one about character. If it does, the outcome is not obvious.

One might think that Turnbull would start off ahead in such a contest. He has long enjoyed a general popularity and grudging respect, even from his enemies. In recent years he appears to have shed much of an old reputation for being brusque, impatient with colleagues, and uninclined to listen. He usually seems serene and above the hurly-burley, is rarely flustered and remains genuinely interested in a wider world outside politics. He is impervious to insult based on his wealth; more accurately, the public does not hold it against him.

The Coalition has tried out its character attack on Shorten, and its outlines are clear. What's not so clear is whether it sticks. Many, but not all, of the criticisms come from the royal commission into trade unions where a convincing case was made that Shorten, as an AWU leader, and other senior AWU colleagues made deals with employers which sold workers down the drain while enriching his union and enhancing and entrenching his power. From the left, one might say that Bill Shorten ran a tame boss's union and was more interested in hobnobbing with the toffs (and in flying in their executive jets) than in promoting the interests of the membership.

Critics can easily extrapolate beyond that to recognising that Shorten is a Labor leader because of his factional power, rather than his personality, his ideas or ideals. He may have proven an effective manager of a divided and defeated party, but he has been unable to lead it. His factional power could be said to be a cancerous outgrowth of his union power, one which has turned, in part, on fraud by union people about the real size of the union membership.

Shorten is, in short, a fairly uninspiring creature of a corrupted party system. No one has called him personally dishonest. But he is bland – the more difficult product if, as we expect, this is the first election in a decade in which voters will be deciding who they prefer, rather who they detest.

If it were simply a matter of personality or disposition, one might expect that Turnbull could beat Shorten hands down. It's not that easy.

Turnbull carries the burden of his party, its intense factionalism and personality politics, as much as Shorten carries the many burdens of recent Labor history. Popular estimation of Turnbull has fallen dramatically because he has failed since becoming prime minister to be himself, to be decisive, or to be in charge.

He has governed as some sort of zombie Tony Abbott, seemingly afraid to change Abbott policies in anything but style. On important policies one has seen not his temperament or his instincts but an apparent determination to not much change the formula which put Abbott into office, even as it seemed to make him incapable of retaining it.

If voters merely thought that he was sticking to a few Abbott-era decisions, say about same-sex marriage, or position on the carbon tax, merely as a part of a compact by which he had won power, they might understand and forgive, at least until after this election when Turnbull could claim a mandate in his own right. But Turnbull has done little to impose his own personality and style on government (other than in a process sense).

He has disappointed many who had hoped and expected, at the least, that he might be more liberal on refugees, more expansive on climate change, and more inclined to be pragmatic rather than ideological on health and education. More himself, the alternative leader once prepared to be forced out of office on a point of principle. In nearly nine months of government it is almost impossible to say that Turnbull has changed the character of conservative coalition government. Unless or until he breaks out in some manner which shows him to be master of his party his moral authority in the electorate will decline. People will judge him just another manager, and, judged as such, not obviously superior to the alternatives, whether in his own party or the other side.

It's more of a burden with issues such as refugee policy, or the policy of being as beastly as possible to people in detention. Turnbull is increasingly talking himself into being as hardline as anyone in the Coalition. Like Abbott he bolsters this by arguing, for political effect, that Labor, despite its own tough talk, is more divided, more irresolute, and less likely to be hold the line than he is.

Perhaps from his point of view he has little choice. But no one could know better than he that this is the issue that will drag down his reputation and his place in the history books. The next generation will neither understand his lack of courage nor his lack of action. Much the same is true of his currently wishy-washy stand on the environment. On this, for nine months, he has done nothing but parrot the policies of his party enemies.

He has enemies, from his right, who will not hesitate to sabotage the election campaign if he tries to assert his own ideas. So be it. If he is half the leader he pretends, with a quarter of the soundness of principle and philosophy, he would not play the man without a spine. That may be the primary question of the election.